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Chris Baker, AIA, PE, BEMP, BEAP, LEED AP BD+C

Project Executive

Chris Baker provides comparative energy and daylighting analysis to empower design teams to achieve high-performance buildings. He works closely with the architects and engineers to cost-effectively save energy on individual projects, and partners with industry committees to set policies and standards to drive energy efficiency across our built environment. Chris works closely with our software developers to create tools that allow us to reach more buildings with deep energy analysis in a timely and cost-effective way.

As Project Executive, he is responsible for building market position by establishing relationships with key clients. He is a frequent writer and speaker at national and regional conferences. Chris is a voting member and subcommittee chair of ASHRAE SPC 209 Proposed Standard on Energy Simulation Aided Design and the Buildings Committee Affiliate Co-chair for the National Association of State Energy Officials. In addition, Chris was named as Midwest Energy News 40 under 40 in 2015.

Publications

Energy Modeling, like sketching, should be used throughout the design process to inform and shape the design. Just like a sketch can allow you to explore some detail without knowing all the other details, an energy model can let you see the impacts of different design choices. This allows promising ideas with strong potential energy savings to be incorporated early, but just as importantly, it allows ideas that have less savings potential to be considered, and abandoned early, letting the team focus on the ideas that will have the greatest cumulative savings, an attractive return on investment, or whatever other goal they are pursuing for the project. The true value of this approach is—when used early during design—we are able to find the optimal combination of strategies in real-time, during design meetings.